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Monday, May 23, 2016

Writing Words for Nerds #AtoZChallenge--U is for Unique

“My book is fantastic!”
he said. “And it’s unique! There’s no way anyone has ever written anything like
it.”

I rolled my
eyes, which was okay, because no one can hear you roll your eyes over the
telephone. I think.

This was a
friend of my husband, and he needed to talk to me because he had just written a
children’s book, and he wanted someone to publish it.

Unlike me,
he didn’t have a literature degree and he wasn’t published even once in some
local magazine, forget about having years of experience as a newspaper and
magazine writer and illustrator. He was just a dad who had made up a story that
entertained his kid. But in his heart he knew
it was the best thing since The Cat in the Hat, only better.

Too bad he
wasn’t a celebrity. Then maybe his story would have had a shot.

“Are you
sure?” I asked. “How many picture books have you read?”

“I don’t
need to read any picture books,” he said. “I just need to you to tell me how
you get a publisher.”

“It doesn’t
work like that.” I sighed. “You have to read children’s books to make sure it
hasn’t been done before.”

“I know it
hasn’t, because it’s unique.” There he went again.

I wasn’t
about to ask him what made it unique. The way he skirted the subject, I could
tell he was afraid that I was going to steal his fantastic and unique idea.

Yeah, it
doesn’t work like that, either. Real writers like me have more ideas than we
know what to do with. We don’t go around stealing them.

Eventually,
I gave up and told him to buy a copy of the latest Children’s Writer’s & Illustrator’s
Market guide. I felt bad about helping someone add to the world’s slush
piles. Stuff like that gives the rest of us a bad name. It makes publishers
close their doors to submissions, which makes everything harder for those of us
who know what we’re doing. Sometimes we even give up on the submission process,
which means the slush piles get worse and worse, and the door openings get
narrower and narrower.

But there
wasn’t anything else I could do. In his eyes, his story was amazing. He said
so, so it had to be true! Why couldn’t I just take his word for it? And why was
I standing in the way of his obviously brilliant idea? So I didn’t. I gave in. I
wasn’t about to destroy his day-old dream of publishing a picture book and
becoming richer than J.K. Rowling all because of his brilliant and unique idea
that took him all of five minutes to come up with. I left that up to the
publishers.

So I how do
I know his story wasn’t all that he thought it was?

Because he
made it clear that he didn’t read children’s books.

That means
his story had either been written a hundred times before, or it actually WAS
unique—but only because there was something so horrible wrong with it that no
decent editor would allow it to be published.

This isn’t
to say that it’s impossible to write something unique and worthy of
publication. It certainly IS possible, and it’s something every writer should
aim for.

But the way
to get there isn’t by refusing to read the books that already exist in your
intended genre.

No, the way
to get there is by reading and reading and reading some more in your chosen
genre. It’s by analyzing those books to figure out what works and what doesn’t
and why. It’s by reading nonfiction books that show you how to analyze and
understand your chosen genre. It’s by reading until you discover there’s a book
you need to read in that genre but can’t because it hasn’t been written yet. Only
once you’ve made that discovery, will you have truly found the seed of
something unique.

But that’s
just the seed.

To help it
grow into a beautiful and unique flower, you’re going to have to plant it in
good soil, water it, feed it, and nurture it.

Because a
story isn’t just an idea. That’s why you can’t copyright an idea. A story is an
idea expressed in a unique way. Only
the way the idea is expressed can be copyrighted.

J.K. Rowling
wasn’t the first person to write a kids’ book about a school of wizardry, but
she was the first person to create Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley
and all the things that make Harry Potter one of the most popular series
of all time.

So how do
you come up with a unique way of expressing
a story idea?

It starts by
reading and reading and reading some more. By analyzing those books to figure
out what works and what doesn’t and why. By looking for the things you can say that no
one else has said—not because they’re horribly wrong, but because no one with
your unique way of looking at the world and expressing what you see has ever
tried it before.

That’s how
you develop the one thing every editor and every agent says he or she is
looking for: a unique voice.

All of this
takes time. If you just decided to be a children’s book writer yesterday, trust
me, you’re nowhere close. Pick up a bunch of children’s books are start
reading. Analyze what you read. How many
pages are there? How many words are on a page? How much of the story is told
through the text, and how much through the illustrations? Is there dialogue?
Who’s the main character? What age? Is there something on the right-hand page
that makes you want to turn the page to find out what happens next? To quote Mem
Fox, “Writing a picture book is like writing War and Peace in haiku.” This job is a lot harder than it looks.

Or as Pablo
Picasso put it, “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an
artist.”

You first
need to learn what a voice is before you can develop one that’s unique to you.
You need to understand the rules before you can break them, or at least make
them your own.

So what
exactly is a writer’s voice? More on
that in my next blog post.